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Company 3 uses ArriScan for File-Based Workflow

Sun, 06/13/2010 - 20:00 -- Nick Dager

Award-winning post-production facility Company 3 has built an innovative file-based post-production pipeline around its ArriScan film scanner to handle all film negatives for commercials music videos and feature films. Known for finishing high profile commercials (over half the spots that aired during the Super Bowl were colored there) and films Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Oscar winner The Hurt Locker Company 3 prefers to scan film for commercials rather than telecine. Mike Chiado vice president of engineering for Company 3 Santa Monica and New York says “The idea behind our workflow was to have everything working the same way. Anything that comes in as film is scanned with the ArriScan and then treated as data. Of course material that comes in as data remains data throughout.” Company 3 co-founder and colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld says “The overall picture quality of a true scan yields a cleaner less noisy result. With scanners we’re starting with full-resolution red green and blue channels combined. You can't get that kind of information with a telecine device. From my standpoint it was primarily about picture quality.” Company 3 did extensive evaluation on other scanners before deciding on the ArriScan. Says Chiado “The pin registration was another big factor. Producers could send any of our scans to any visual effects house and know that they had the optimal quality to work with. Nobody would have to waste resources on fixes.” All color grading work at Company 3 is file-based allowing certain benefits for customers. “We have an all-data workflow ” says Chiado. “Because it's nonlinear we can just load an EDL into the system and call up material to work on it in the order it's supposed to be seen not in the order it was shot. The workflow also allows for much greater flexibility if changes are required. Often in a tape-based environment changes had to be done in the form of an additional tape-to-tape session which causes a loss in quality.” Arri www.arri.com Company 3 www.company3.com